Ending and Unending Agony

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. His many books include Poetry as Experience; Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics; and, with Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism.

• Translator's Note Acknowledgements Introduction Leonid Kharlamov and Aristide Bianchi Ending and Unending Agony (on Maurice Blanchot) Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Foreword I. "The Secret Miracle" (20 July?) Fidelities The Contestation of Death Annexes 1. Birth is Death 2. The Agony of Religion II. Ending and Unending Agony (22 September?) Ending and Unending Agony Appendix [In 1976, Malraux...] Interview with Pascal Possoz Dismay Bibliographical Note Index of Names

"Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's vigilant engagement with Blanchot's late 'autobiographical' texts is a piercing testimony to the originality and power of a writer whose significance should be beyond dispute. For those who prize close reading, Ending and Unending Agony will be both an inspiration and a delight." -- -Kevin Hart University of Virginia "As it makes its way, in a manner that is painstakingly attentive and demanding, through two texts by Maurice Blanchot (The Instant of My Death and "(A Primal Scene?)"), Ending and Unending Agony explores the relationship between "dying" and "writing": Does not each hold the truth of the other as they relate to the immemorial? That which never took place and of which there is neither memory nor forgetting is also that which binds us to the extremity of sense, where sense renders itself absent. What is at stake as this limit is reached? Can one speak of "myth"-something Blanchot had ruled out long ago-or rather of an experience which no one can experience but which nevertheless leaves a trace? Such are some of the questions to which English-speaking audiences may now direct their attention thanks to this translation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's book on Blanchot." -- -Jean-Luc Nancy University Marc Bloch, Strasbourg "Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, writer, thinker, translator and interpreter of Holderlin, Heidegger, and Benjamin, was also one of Maurice Blanchot's most constant, scrupulous, and uncompromising readers. In this book on death's interruptions, itself interrupted by death, he provides an incisive, rigorous, and illuminating account of the work of one of the twentieth-century's most incisive, rigorous, and illuminating thinkers. It is powerful testimony to the enduring contemporaneity of an unending dialogue exploring with remarkable originality the possibilities and impossibilities of writing and its critical relationship with literature, philosophy, and politics." -- -Leslie Hill University of Warwick